Author: Simon

The voting is a bit one-sided at the moment but it seems that working practice has outpaced guidelines again. The FeaturingArtistStyle has always been the bone of contention (see SG5DisasterRelief for example) – now the question is if AdvancedRelationships as a mean of crediting of what an artist has actually done on a release (in NextGenerationSchema-talk: “what it is”) are shifting the “feat.” in track titles to a role where it only credits “what it says”, that is when the artist intended to credit guest appearances prominently on the cover.
The con is that the presence or non-presence of “feat.” on covers barely expresses artist intent because it is done by cover designers and mostly the artist doesn’t have a say in the design.

What’s it about? Well, in short: if an artist releases a song on their website that is likely or said to appear on a release in the future, then is this a legal non-album track or not? Of course it’s also possible that it will definitely appear on a release but in another version.

So, shall we wait until the release is out and then only add it as a NAT if it’s a different version or should we just add it and later delete it if necessary (the guidelines state this)?